[tdwg-tag] Blog: UUIDs may be Dangerous

Gregor Hagedorn g.m.hagedorn at gmail.com
Fri Nov 21 15:26:18 CET 2008


Donald writes:
> I worry however that, even if we deprecate URLs like http://www.my.org/entomology/tomcat/display.jsp?catno=12345 in favour of something more like http://my.org/stable-id/entomologycollection/12345, we are left with the following problems:
> 1. my.org still needs to step up to the long-term responsibility to handle URL rewriting for these ids.
> 2. my.org still needs to return data in a standard agreed form (e.g. RDF or OWL) when requested from these URLs.

On 1: I think it would be a great community service, to provide

stable-id.gbif.net/my.org/entomologycollection/12345 for those having
problems meeting the technical or management demands.

On 2: Why should we limit ourselves to web technologies of the very
early 21st century?

Seriously, I believe the system of content negotation is much more
flexible than the fixed LSID system (which though not fixed per se to
RDF, requires a global agreement). With standard content negotiation
web technology a provider can migrate to newer standards later on, but
still honor requests for xml/rdf type. And without any effort, the
same URL can provide human readable content in a format desired by the
provider.

Gregor

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